In
the middle of a rock festival, a charity worker is sliced across the
stomach. He dies minutes later. In a crowd of thousands, no one saw his
attacker.

The following week, the body of a primary school teacher
is found in a dumpster in an Edinburgh alley, strangled with her own
woollen scarf.

D.I. Ava Turner and D.I. Luc Callanach have no
leads and no motive – until around the city, graffitied on buildings,
words appear describing each victim.

It’s only when they realise
the words are being written before rather than after the murders, that
they understand the killer is announcing his next victim…and the more
innocent the better.

GUEST POST

No one just wakes up one day and
decides to write a book. There’s
always a backstory. Mine was a relatively lonely childhood in the New Forest
with older siblings to whom I was simply an annoyance, and busy working
parents. I turned to pen and paper, and soon it became not only an escape but
an obsession. I wrote plays and poetry, mainly, as a child, often dragging my
school friends into performances during assemblies. I once constructed such an
elaborate tale about drug dealers operating from our local church that another
girl’s
parents complained to the headmaster that I was causing her nightmares. I was
aged ten. These days, I’m
delighted to say that I get paid for professional nightmare causation.

At
secondary school, I skipped the necessary studying to excel in chemistry and
physics, instead writing thirty page fictional essays (my english teacher must
have hated me) and delighting in discovering authors such as DH Lawrence and
Thomas Hardy. I fell so deeply in love with the novel Far From The Madding
Crowd that I named my first son Gabriel. These are the effects books have, of
course, and none more so than those we fall in love with during our formative
years.

1984,
Catcher in the Rye, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula and The Great Gatsby were some of my school era reads that gave me a
passion for literature. Those novels, amongst others, and the opening lines
from the poem Mending Wall by Robert Frost.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”

It
fascinates me how some language can leave us cold and yet a different
combination of words can light a fire that burns for decades. This is what
every author tries to capture when they write. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes
we fail, but the aim is always to light that elusive fire inside our readers.
So where does the magic lie? Novels are a different proposition than poetry, of
course, but the construct is the same. Find the right words to draw a picture
in the imagination and get them in the right order. Building gripping stories
is the next layer. Characters and concepts is what it boils down to.

I
found 1984 genuinely scary when I first read it, aged thirteen. I had the
benefit of angst-filled anti-authoritarian youth to send my imagination
reeling, but still, it is a plot that removes you from the everyday and
superimposes a new reality across your world. I found an adulthood within the
pages, that is all too poignant as I watch the world my children are growing up
in. The trick is that the novel makes you angry early on, and the emotion
sticks. Dracula was a book way beyond its time. Bram Stoker was a journalist,
and he had a real talent for building suspense. Whilst not the most frightening
of the literature I read in my teenage years, I recall being blown away by the
subject matter Stoker was writing compared with his peers. It was a brave
decision not to follow the trends of the time. I think all innovative writing
needs that - the determination to write what you feel compelled to write,
rather than what the marketplace craves at any given moment.

When
JD Salinger created Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, he unexpectedly
released an icon amongst teenagers that endures today. I didn’t get caught up in the darkness of the
novel as so many readers did, but I remember the sense of delicacy the writing
invoked, the feeling that a teenage life is fragile thing. What Salinger does
brilliantly is leave a trail of emotions so much more complex than the simple
words on the page. Few writers before or since have sewn such difficult subject
matter with such fine thread.

The
Great Gatsby made me feel frustrated. My lasting memory is of wanting to shake
the characters and wake them up, perhaps not a normal reaction to this text but
then the books that have the greatest effect on us do not have to be ones we
love for traditional reasons. Usually they are the books that provoke the
strongest reactions within us. The book was overshadowed by the film and Robert
Redford’s
face turned it into something less, for me. A rather cloying romantic affair
which minimised its importance. The book is about social upheaval and the
juxtaposition of niceties with the realities of emotions. I would not reread it
now, although perhaps I should. I rather enjoy the slight irritation it left me
with aged fourteen.

These
days, the reality is that I don’t have as much time to read as I’d like, which is why I choose the books I read
very carefully. I would rather read fewer books and be able to remember them
clearly, than race through and have them all muddle into one large generic
story. That said, reading is escapism. There should’t be any snobbery about it. Every book gives its
reader something, even if that is only a few minutes respite from the stress,
strains or routine of every day life. Part of me wishes I could wipe the slate
clean and have no memory of the books that shaped the reader I am today, to
experience them anew. Wouldn’t that be bliss?

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